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Category: drones

Emerging technologies are shaking up how we grow food, distribute it, and even what we’re eating. We are seemingly on the cusp of a food revolution and undoubtedly, technologies including artificial intelligence will play a huge role in helping people grow healthier, more resilient food faster and with less energy than ever before.

Rob Nail, Singularity University’s CEO and Associate Founder, provides a few examples of how robotics, automation, and drones are transforming agriculture in this short video:

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https://youtube.com/watch?v=zX4XXLb_Vuw

While the US military continues to develop new and awesome ways of blowing aerial drones to smithereens, not many of these systems can easily be adapted to use in the civilian realm. That’s why Battelle has developed the DroneDefender, a shoulder-mounted rifle that knocks UAVs offline with a barrage of radio waves.

“It can help us in numerous settings, from the White House lawn to bases and embassies overseas; from prisons and schools to historic sites,” Alex Morrow, technical director on the project, said in a statement. “It easily and reliably neutralizes the threat.” The weapon weighs roughly 10 pounds and can target drones up to 400 meters away. When the trigger is pulled, the gun emits a blast of electromagnetic energy tuned to the most common GPS and ISM frequencies, safely disabling the drone and preventing it from accepting any additional commands from its operator. This is especially helpful if the drone is equipped with an improvised explosive device.

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The future of Eco conservation?

Deforestation downs 10 billion trees around the globe annually. Replanting trees by hand is slow, expensive, and barely puts a dent in reversing the damage. But one startup wants to use drones that can reforest our increasingly tree-strapped Earth, on a big enough scale to replace slow and expensive hired humans.

The small company, called BioCarbon Engineering, says unmanned aerial vehicles are a great way of covering ravaged woodlands with seedlings that can repopulate the area’s tree population. Around the world, forests and jungles are still being leveled due to lumber overproduction, strip surface mining, urban expansion, and land use for agriculture.

But UK-based BioCarbon, founded by former NASA engineer Lauren Fletcher, has a plan: Use fixed-wing drones to map the topography of the land, as well as the nutrients and biodiversity. That info is put into a machine-learning algorithm to generate a “precision planting platform,” says Susan Graham, head of engineering at BioCarbon.

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https://youtube.com/watch?v=D0DbgNju2wE

Say hello to the drones of the future. They’re gorgeous, sophisticated, and they’ve got high-energy lasers.

The body of the drone will look familiar to those who are familiar with current drones as those lasers will be riding shotgun–quite literally–on General Atomics Aeronautical Systems’s Avenger. The company, also responsible for the Reaper, is embarking on a privately-funded study to figure out how to incorporate 150-kilowatt solid-state laser onto the drone, according to an interview with Defenseone. Depending on the success of the study, the company is hoping to have the laser drones up and running by 2017.

Basically, the funding for this program is enough to figure out if it’s possible, and if so, how to create a laser that’s compatible with the Avenger.

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Two quadrocopters construct a rope bridge strong enough to carry the weight of a human in the hypnotic video (above), uploaded to YouTube this week by researcher Federico Augugliaro. The impressive feat wasn’t a one-person operation. It’s the latest accomplishment from many researches and contributors at the Institute for Dynamic Systems and Control and Gramazio Kohler Research, and incorporates lessons learned from other tests at the Flying Machine Arena in Zurich, Switzerland.

The 10-by-10-by-10-meter portable space doubles as the setting of the footage and the lab in which many of the researchers, including Augugliaro, perform drone experiments and exercises. According to the Flying Machine Arena’s website, the room “consists of a high-precision motion capture system, a wireless communication network, and custom software executing sophisticated algorithms for estimation and control.”

Drone bridge GIF Drone bridge GIF

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The U.S. military doesn’t just build big, scary tanks and giant warplanes; it’s also interested in teeny, tiny stuff. The Pentagon’s latest research project aims to improve today’s technologies by shrinking them down to microscopic size.

The recently launched Atoms to Product (A2P) program aims to develop atom-size materials to build state-of-the-art military and consumer products. These tiny manufacturing methods would work at scales 100,000 times smaller than those currently being used to build new technologies, according to the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA.

The tiny, high-tech materials of the future could be used to build things like hummingbird-size drones and super-accurate (and super-small) atomic clocks — two projects already spearheaded by DARPA. [Humanoid Robots to Flying Cars: 10 Coolest DARPA Projects].

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Aerial drones are great for providing a bird’s eye view of our world. That said, some people are more interested in seeing a fish’s eye view of their local seacoast or lake. Previously, such folks had to build their own underwater remote-operated vehicle (ROV). Three years ago, San Francisco startup OpenROV made things a little easier for them, by offering an ROV kit that users put together themselves. Now, the company is crowdfunding the fully-assembled Trident ROV, which can reportedly be “flown” through the water.

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Never mind the 111-inch double-sided TV that LG showed off at IFA earlier this month; that’s so 2015.

A rollable TV, though — now that’s something I could see fitting in nicely to my pimped-out IoT living room of 2016.

Maybe I’ll unroll this rollable TV in bed each morning, and have a drone fly over the coffee that my smart, connected coffee machine poured ahead of time — after it was pinged by my Apple Watch that I was about to wake up.

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